Just One More Game ...

Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’

Published: April 4, 2012

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Then, midway through the dark forest of my adult life, the iPhone came out. This presented a unique problem. It was not only a phone and a camera and a compass and a map and a tiny window through which to see the entire Internet — it was also a pocket-size game console three times as sophisticated as anything I grew up with. My wife, who had never been a serious gamer, got one and became addicted, almost immediately, to a form of off-brand digital Scrabble called Words With Friends. Before long she was playing 6 or 10 games at a time, against people all over the world. Sometimes I would lose her in the middle of a conversation: her phone would go brinnng or pwomp or dernalernadern-dern, and she would look away from me, midsentence, to see if her opponent had set her up for a triple word score. I tried to stay good-humored. I told her I was going to invent something called the iPaddle: a little screen-size wooden paddle that I would slide in front of her phone whenever she drifted away, on the back of which, upside-down so she could read them, would be inscribed humanist messages from the analog world: “I love you” or “Be here now.”

Illustration by Aled Lewis

Illustration by Aled Lewis

Inevitably, my high-minded detachment didn’t last long. About a year ago, unable to resist the rising cultural tide and wanting (I convinced myself) a camera with which to take pictures of my children, I gave in and bought an iPhone. For a while I used it only to read, to e-mail and to take pictures. Then I downloaded chess, which seemed wholesome enough — the PBS of time-wasters. But chess turned out to be a gateway game. Once I formed the habit of finding reliable game joy in my omnipresent pocket-window, my inner 13-year-old reasserted himself. I downloaded horribly titled games like Bix (in which you steer a dot in a box between other dots in a box) and MiZoo (in which you make patterns out of exotic cartoon animal heads). These led to better, more time-consuming games — Orbital, Bejeweled, Touch Physics, Anodia — which led to even better games: Peggle, Little Wings. One tiny masterpiece, Plants vs. Zombies, ate up, I’m going to guess, a full “Anna Karenina”.title> of my leisure time. One day while I was playing it (I think I had just discovered that if you set up your garlic and your money-flowers exactly right, you could sit there racking up coins all day), my wife reminded me of my old joke about the iPaddle. This made me inexplicably angry.

And so video games were back in my life.

My plunge into the world of stupid games was not mine alone: over the last few years, millions of people have been sucked into that vortex. As the venture capitalist John Doerr told Vanity Fair last summer, “These games are not for everyone, it’s true, but it’s for more of everyone than anything else I know.” In 2011, Rovio’s chief executive claimed that Angry Birds players were spending 200 million minutes inside the game every day — a number that seems simultaneously absurd and plausible. A number like that can’t tell us, however, about the quality of those minutes; how many of them were fun or fulfilling or even intentional.

Humans have always played stupid games. Dice are older than recorded history. Ancient Egyptians played a board game called Senet, which archaeologists believe was something like sacred backgammon. We have rock-paper-scissors, tick-tack-toe, checkers, dominoes and solitaire — small, abstract games in which sets of simple rules play out in increasingly complex scenarios. (Chess, you might say, is the king of stupid games: the tide line where stupid games meet genius.)

But pre-Tetris games were different in a primal way. They required human opponents or at least equipment — the manipulation of three-dimensional objects in space. When you sat down to play them, chances were you meant to sit down and play them.

Stupid games, on the other hand, are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits. You glance down to check your calendar and suddenly it’s 40 minutes later and there’s only one level left before you jump to the next stage, so you might as well just launch another bird.

For most of the last 25 years, it was easy to avoid playing these kinds of games. The game industry operated on a Hollywood model: big companies invested heavily in the production of what came to be known as “Triple-A” games, the industry equivalent of summer blockbusters, which were designed to be played mainly on consoles (PlayStation, Xbox, Dreamcast and GameCube). Like summer blockbusters, these games usually involved quests and wars and bombastic special effects that made them appealing to teenage boys. A Triple-A game could have a production budget of $25 million, with hundreds of developers working on it for years at a time and a $50 million marketing campaign to ensure its ubiquity upon release. On the strength of this model, video-game revenue more than doubled from 1996 to 2005, with the vast majority of that wealth coming from a tiny sliver of blue-chip franchises like Halo, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and Battlefield. There was a downside, however, to the Hollywood model, which was that the industry fell prey to all the complaints people had been making for decades about Hollywood. The huge budgets and time investments created a conservative, risk-averse culture. Everything was about imitations, spinoffs, prequels, sequels and even subsequels. There is not only a Halo 3 but an entirely separate game called Halo 3: ODST. (It stands for Orbital Drop Shock Troopers.) Meanwhile, the juggernaut companies (Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Rockstar Games) dominated the market so thoroughly that independent game designers, who might have refreshed things, had no practical way to get their work in front of consumers.

Then, in 2007, the iPhone appeared. Games were much easier to develop and easier to distribute through Apple’s app store. Instead of just passing their work around to one another on blogs, independent game designers suddenly had a way to reach everyone — not just hard-core gamers, but their mothers, their mailmen and their college professors. Consumers who never would have put a quarter into an arcade or even set eyes on an Xbox 360 were now carrying a sophisticated game console with them, all the time, in their pockets or their purses.

This had a profound impact on game design. In the era of consoles, most games were designed to come to life on a stationary piece of furniture — a television or a desktop computer. The games were built accordingly, around long narratives (quests, wars, the rise and fall of civilizations) that could be explored comfortably while sitting cross-legged on a living-room carpet.

Smartphone games are built on a very different model. The iPhone’s screen is roughly the size of a playing card; it responds not to the fast-twitch button combos of a controller but to more intuitive and intimate motions: poking, pinching, tapping, tickling. This has encouraged a very different kind of game: Tetris-like little puzzles, broken into discrete bits, designed to be played anywhere, in any context, without a manual, by any level of player. (Charles Pratt, a researcher in New York University’s Game Center, refers to such games as “knitting games.”) You could argue that these are pure games: perfectly designed minisystems engineered to take us directly to the core of gaming pleasure without the distraction of narrative. The Angry Birds creators like to compare their game with Super Mario Brothers. But the first and simplest level of Super Mario Brothers takes about a minute and a half to finish. The first level of Angry Birds takes around 10 seconds.

Of all the stupid games I’ve played, I became addicted to only one: Drop7, a candy-colored fusion of Tetris and Sudoku. Like its ancestors, Drop7 is basically a miniature obsessive-­compulsive-disorder playground. The computer tries to fill up the screen while you try to keep it empty. It took me a few days to figure out the game’s basic strategies (pay attention to the gray discs) then a few more weeks to figure out some more advanced tricks (focus on the grid’s edges), and before long I entered the danger zone. I was playing when I should have been doing dishes, bathing my children, conversing with relatives, reading the newspaper and especially (especially) writing. The game was an anesthetic, an escape pod, a snorkel, a Xanax, a dental hygienist with whom to exchange soothingly meaningless banter before going under the pneumatic drill of Life. Soon I found myself struggling in the net of real addiction. Even as I pressed “New Game,” my brain would be thinking, very consciously, I have to stop playing this game. But I didn’t. Instead, I spread the Drop7 virus to other people: my wife, my friends, my mother, my in-laws. I found myself playing in all kinds of extreme situations: at 3 a.m., during a severe gastrointestinal crisis; immediately after an intense discussion with my mother; shortly after learning that my dog — the warm, emoting mammal I lived with for 12 years — was probably dying of cancer.

I wanted to understand how such a little game had managed, in such a short time, to drill down and implant its eggs right in the core of my life. So I e-mailed Frank Lantz, the man who designed Drop7. Lantz co-founded a company called Area/Code, is the director of New York University’s Game Center and is just generally one of New York City’s reigning geniuses of the mysteries of games. (He once oversaw a physical version of Pac-Man, enacted by actual humans, on the grid of New York City streets.) His company had just been purchased by Zynga, one of the titans of stupid games. I wanted to ask him: What is the secret genius of stupid games? Why am I so susceptible to them? How did Drop7 manage to take over my brain? First, though, I asked him if he could help me in another way: if he happened to know of any young design geniuses who were working on the problem of stupid games — someone likely to invent the next Drop7 or Angry Birds or Bejeweled but who had yet to be absorbed by one of the big companies.

Lantz responded with an e-mail that contained, in its entirety, a single name: Zach Gage.